341K: 70s-80s Book About Colors

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I don’t remember if there were characters or much of a plot, but what I do remember is that it had lushly illustrated two-page spreads where each spread was devoted to a single color. I think yellow was a picnic in a wheat field with buttered bread…I also think there was a spread that depicted the beach (not sure what color it might have represented). Also, I think in each spread there was a teaser color spot or object that represented the next color’s scene. I think the book ended with a scene of all the colors. I would have read this in the late 80s, but it might have been 70s etc. It was certainly bigger than a Golden Book or board book.

 

341J: A Family’s Year of American Adventures

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I am looking for a book my uncle read while in 4th or 5th grade in the 1950’s. His teacher had assigned it to the entire class to read as a project. Some key points he remembers are a family pulled their children out of school for the year to travel the United States to experience new places and adventures. They went to a desert, they starred in a Hollywood movie, he also remembers something about birds – sparrow specifically – being in the book. He thinks there was a car on the cover, possibly pulling a trailer behind it.

Please help if you can, I would love to give him this book as a Father’s Day gift and he recently celebrated his 75th birthday too.

341I: Generations of Sleep Rituals (Solved!)

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I had an illustrated picture book about a little girl being tucked in by her mom and learning about how the generations before her did the same thing. She lives in a house, the family has a car, and a swing and her bedroom is upstairs and at bedtime her mom turns out the light and goes downstairs and the girl can hear the wind in the trees and the grownups talking downstairs.  She asks her mom what this was like for her when she was a little girl and it’s all the same except the house, car, swing, lamp, etc are all different but the experience is really similar, then they do it for her grandmother, same thing again. You see the different houses, and kinds of swings, they turn out lights, lanterns, candles, etc. The cover was like a page from a photo album with a taupe background with different.

341G: Mix and Match Animals

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Children’s book pre-1965. All animals drawn to same size – page is then cut in half. A description is on the opposite page and is also cut in half.For example, you could end up with the top half of a giraffe on the bottom of a beagle with the appropriate description.

341F: Human Sterilization for Health Care

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It's not a children's book. I probably read this book 20 years ago and it was not a new book then. I'm guessing it was written some time between the 40s and 60s, but that's just a guess. The book takes place in a society where there have been lots of treatments for genetic diseases, so people who used to die before child-bearing age weren't, passing the diseases along, and health of the population was therefore less robust. (Plus possibly the cost of treatment.) So people were only allowed to get medical treatments, vaccinations, etc. if they were sterilized. I seem to recall people living in a sort of health-care ghetto and many people being anti-health care.

341E: Colorful Knights Defend White And Gold King

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The book I’m looking for is a children’s fiction book that included knights or warriors who were identified by color: green, blue, purple, etc. For sure my son remembers there was a purple one that almost got thrown into a pit of lava. These knights or warriors were defending a kingdom with a king who might have been identified through white and gold clothing. And they were trying to defeat a “dark Lord“ which is probably just a villain in the story and not referred to necessarily by those words.

Any help would be appreciated!

341D: Early Reader Vocabulary Picture Book (Solved!)

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This English vocabulary learning book from the early 1990s (could be older though) featured the daily life of a family in beautiful large center pictures of various scenes, with the outer rims of the pages containing objects from that scene to be found and named.
My most poignant memories are of a night time scene of the children casting shadows with their hands onto the bedroom wall, and a scene with a cross section of a fantastically large tree house with multiple connected rooms.
Any help is appreciated!

341C: Spoiled siblings are reformed by fixing up an old house

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Probably written in the 60s or 70s, this is a YA book about a pair of spoiled siblings growing up in the city (I think the opening scene is of them terrorizing a babysitter). Their parents announce quite suddenly that they (the parents) are going away for the summer and that the kids will live with a relative (an aunt or a cousin) in the country. Their aunt has a husband or boyfriend who I think is Native American and the kids are both afraid of him and passionately unhappy, especially since they are expected to help fix up the big old house in which they are all living. Eventually they start working (I remember clearly a scene in which they scrape all the old paint off of tall pillars out front) and gradually are reformed so that their parents hardly recognize them when they return.

341B: Little Girl Reluctantly Learns Ballet

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I read this book many, many years ago in elementary school. It is about a girl whose parents sign her up for ballet lessons. She doesn’t like ballet and is not excited to attend her lessons. She has an older sister who has been taking lessons for a few years already, and isn’t necessarily happy that her little sister is also taking classes. I remember a certain part where the younger sister is in the locker room and is mortified by the disfigured feet of the older girls in the ballet school.

In the end, she learns to enjoy taking lessons. This is really all I can remember.